Republican Donors Fume Over Trump Putting Texas Senate Seat at Risk

President Trump isn’t spending any campaign cash on close midterm election races, irking his fellow Republicans and putting contests like the Texas Senate seat in jeopardy.

In July, Politico reports, Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC didn’t spend any of its $400 million in the bank on Republican candidates, not even Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who only narrowly won his state’s GOP Senate primary and faces surging Democrat James Talarico.

Republican donors say that Trump needs to step up to keep the Lone Star State from sending its first Democrat to the Senate since 1993, considering that he endorsed scandal-ridden Paxton at the last minute over incumbent John Cornyn. That endorsement was probably the deciding factor in the close runoff election and now Paxton is polling just one point ahead of Talarico, unheard of in staunchly red Texas.

“The message to Trumpworld is, ‘you broke it, now you own it. You gotta spend some of your money to defend him because we’ve got bigger fish to fry,’” one GOP donor told Politico.

A second donor told the publication that “the general view is that’s Trump’s responsibility to bankroll, especially since Paxton took out one [of] the GOP Senate’s best fundraisers and is currently running a lackadaisical campaign.”

These donors would prefer to spend their money on open Senate races in Michigan and North Carolina, kicking out Democrats like Senator Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and protecting vulnerable Republican Senate incumbents like Susan Collins in Maine and Dan Sullivan in Alaska.

“There’s a lot of people that, one, don’t really like Paxton at all, they think he’d be a terrible senator or they were loyal to Cornyn—or both,” a third GOP donor said to Politico. “This is a situation that we didn’t need to spend this money at all. We need it in North Carolina, in Georgia. To make Texas a toss-up is just a foolish, foolish decision.”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is also staying out of Texas, preferring for now to spend its money on eight other races, making Trump’s unwillingness to open his coffers all the more glaring. While the NRSC plans to help set up a joint fundraising campaign with Paxton, any money above a certain amount would go back to the committee, according to Politico.

Trump has not spent any of his campaign money on a candidate since March, and the candidates he endorses keep losing. He’s refusing to accept any blame for Republicans becoming more and more unpopular, either. It seems like he cares less about his party controlling Congress than he does about his own pet projects.